If you Need Really Consistent Cylinder Operation

In order to use compressed air, you first have to compress it. It's that compressibility of air that can create problems when you are trying to use it to stroke an air cylinder smoothly or with consistent stroke timing.To produce consistent, smooth cylinder rod travel, or a consistent speed-of-stroke from end to end, cycle after cycle, then a traditional air cylinder just won't do.Changing conditions in your external cylinder load (friction - sideload for example), seal wear inside the cylinder, variations in the supply air pressure, pulsation from the compressor and many other factors will contribute to varying cylinder rod speed and smoothness.

Each time one of these factors inhibits the rod or tooling travel - even by a little bit - there will be a momentary hesitation in that rod travel as the air pressure inside the cylinder builds to the level necessary to overcome that inhibition. This changes cylinder rod speed and timing inconsistently and continuously.The use of pneumatic flow controls will do much to reduce the impact of the speed and stroke time variations but they cannot ensure that your cylinder stroke and timing will be consistent all the time, as the air that they are throttling will compress as it's being restricted, resulting in changing stroke speed and time. These changes will be less than if no flow controls were used, but if you need really consistent cylinder operation, then you need to consider alternates.

Company Resource:   Air cylinder, Standard cylinder, Micro cylinder

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